Joachim Wink has received his PhD from Frankfurt University, Germany in 1985. He then went into the pharmaceutical industry and started his career at the Hoechst AG, where he was responsible for the strain collection and specialized in the cultivation and taxonomic characterization of Actinobacteria and Myxobacteria. Over the years he became responsible for the strain library within the pharmaceutical research and a number of screening projects with Hoechst Marion Russel, Aventis and Sanofi. In 2005 he completed his postdoctoral degree at the Carolo Wilhelma University of Braunschweig, and in 2012 he transferred to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, where he founded the strain-collection working group and is currently working on the isolation and taxonomic characterization of Myxobacteria and Actinobacteria, as well as the analysis of their secondary metabolites. He has published more than 50 papers on secondary metabolites and the taxonomy of the producing microorganisms in reputed journals, a number of reviews and book chapters, and holds more than 35 patents. He is a member of the editorial board of several international journals.Fatemeh Mohammadipanah completed her PhD project in a joint program between the University of Tehran and University of Göttingen in 2011. She has been working on Actinobacteria since 2008, when she started the taxonomical study of Actinobacteria at the DSMZ. She has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Tehran since 2012. Her primary research interests are in the isolation, taxonomy and in particular bioactive secondary metabolites of bacteria.Javad Hamedi, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
